R. D. Laing

Ronald David Laing (1927 to 1989) was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote widely on mental illness, above all psychosis and schizophrenia. Born in the Govanhill district of Glasgow, he studied medicine at the University of Glasgow, served as a psychiatrist in the British Army, and later trained at the Tavistock Clinic in London. His thinking was shaped by existential philosophy and ran against the drug and electroshock treatments that had become psychiatric orthodoxy. He took a patient's own account of experience as a valid description rather than only a symptom. In 1965 he and colleagues founded the Philadelphia Association and the Kingsley Hall community, where patients and therapists lived together. His book The Divided Self (1960) is his best known work. He is often linked with the anti-psychiatry movement, though he rejected that label, and he was also regarded as a thinker of the New Left.